MotF 173: I Come to Bury Caesar

[Kaiphranos]

MotF 173: I Come to Bury Caesar

The Challenge

Make a map showing the effects of a significant historical figure's death.

The Restrictions

There are no restrictions on when the PoD of your map should be. Fantasy, sci-fi, and future maps are allowed.


If you're not sure whether your idea meets the criteria of this challenge, please feel free to PM me or comment in the main thread.
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Entries will end for this round when the voting thread is posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2018.
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ALL DISCUSSION ON THE CONTEST OR ITS ENTRIES MUST TAKE PLACE IN THE MAIN THREAD. PLEASE.
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Any discussion must take place in the main thread. If you post anything other than a map entry (or a description accompanying a map entry) in this thread then you will be asked to delete the post.

Remember to vote on the previous MotF round!​

 

[lock]

Exhibit: Post-war Alliances of Europe, 1966
Timeline: EBK0020

MPOD: Death of Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Yugoslav partisans and future President of Yugoslavia
Earth Prime (EP) Lifespan: 1890-1980
Timeline EBK0020 Lifespan: 1890-1941

Report (Europe only):
Timeline EBK0020 digresses from EP sometime in early 1941, with the first major point of departure (MPOD) being the death of Josip Broz Tito on May 8, 1941. His death stalled the rise of the Yugoslav partisan movement in World War II and allowed German, Italian, and Hungarian forces to quell the resistance movements in the western Balkans before it became a major threat.

As 1941 and 1942 progressed, German and Italian forces were able to secure rebel areas across Bosnia and Serbia, while Bulgarian forces secured areas in the south. By 1943, organized resistance was limited to communist rebels in Macedonia, supplied from communist rebels in Bulgaria. This allowed for German forces to redeploy to areas in Ukraine. When the Eastern front began to disintegrate for the Axis in 1944, the north collapsed first allowing Soviet troops to pour across the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Poland as German forces held their ground for most of the summer along the Dnieper.

Even though Allied forces were progressing up the Italian Peninsula in 1944, German troops were withdrawn to stave off the Soviet troops in Poland. This allowed American, Canadian, and British forces to move forward even more quickly, advancing to the Po River before winter weather set in. With wildly successful advances in Italy, US forces made a tentative landing in Albania, securing a beachhead north of Tirana. Finding limited resistance, they managed to secure all of Albania and most of the Dalmatian coast by the end of the year.

In the north of Europe, it was a foregone conclusion that Soviet troops would reach Berlin first. And by February, the German government had evacuated to Munich. Western Allied troops were slower to advance through the Rhine Valley, but picked up speed in the spring across central and southern Germany. Eventually, Soviet and Western troops met roughly along the Elbe. In the last days of the war, there were last minute pushes by Americans to take Prague, Salzburg, and Sarajevo, as Russians pushed for control of the Kiel Canal and subsequently liberated Denmark. VE Day in this timeline is June 2, 1945.

At the Postwar conference at Potsdam, earlier agreements were scrapped after the Soviets announced the integration of the Baltic States and the entirety of East Prussia into its territory. Thus, occupation zones largely reflected Western and Soviet troop positions on VE Day. Hamburg was designated an internationally administered neutral city, and was later designated as the headquarters of the United Nations. Disputes about how to reunite Czechoslovakia went unresolved as Soviet forces held Slovakia and Moravia, and American forces controlled areas around Prague: the countries of Bohemia and Moravoslovakia were the result. Likewise Yugoslavia was divided up into several countries, with Bulgarian Communists rewarded for their actions against the Axis with additional territory in Macedonia and along the Aegean coast.

Postwar Europe in EBK0020, like EP, organized itself into two blocs. By 1948, western European countries, along with the US and Canada, had formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), followed later that year of the Eastern European Defense Pact (Eedp). The first proxy conflict of the new Cold War was the Greek Civil War (1946-1950). This eventually ended in a stalemate between the two belligerents. A Communist government formed in Athens, called the Hellenic Democratic Republic ("Aegean Greece"), and a Capitalist government called the Republic of Hellas ("Ionian Greece") was organized with a new capital city at Sparta.

By 1954, Germany had officially split into two countries: the Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany") and the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany"). In 1955, Austrians in western occupied areas were allowed to choose between a reforming of Austria, an integration with Germany, or a different option as determined by the people. Although voters in central Austria chose integration with Germany, voters in the state of Tyrol chose outright independence, while the westernmost state of Voralsburg chose integration with Switzerland. (This resulted in the principality of Liechtenstein being completely surrounded by Switzerland.) Italian South Tyrol would join the Republic of Tyrol in 1960.

In 1956, the USSR proposed a similar plebiscite to citizens of Soviet Occupied eastern Austria. In those elections, eastern Austrians chose to join with Hungary to reform a Democratic Republic of Austria-Hungary, with joint capitols in Vienna and Budapest.

As of 1966, the continent is stable politically, but in a Cold War. Potential locations of instability include Kattegat (Denmark/Sweden), Elbe River Valley (Nato/Eedp), and Aegean Sea (Aegean Greece/Ionian Greece/Turkey), as well as Northern Ireland.

Key political quote from EBK0020:
"From Hamburg in the North Sea to Thessaloniki in the Aegean, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere."
-- Winston Churchill, 1946 (before the Greek Civil War)

 

[TapReflex]

Socrates dies in the Peloponnesian Wars before his entry into Philosophy. The Pythagoreans get more influence in Athens as an indirect result. Several hundred years later, there are still worshippers of Pythagoras. Few, but still worshippers none the less.

 

[Kaiphranos]

In the late sixth century, invading Angles had carved out two kingdoms along the coast of northern Britain - Bernicia in the north and Deira in the south. Around 593, a man named Æthelfrith became king of Bernicia, and began pushing inland more vigorously, particularly against the Brythonic kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin. In 599, he married a daughter of king Ælla of Deira, sealing an alliance between the two Anglian kingdoms. In response, Mynyddog of Gododdin began building an alliance among the fractious Brythonic kingdoms, gathering warriors from among them and eventually launching a preemptive strike against Æthelfrith at Catraeth in 600. In our world, this effort failed, and Æthelfrith would go on to smash the Britons and take direct control of Deira. The combined kingdom would eventually come to be known as Northumbria.

In this world, things go a little differently - Æthelfrith is killed at Catraeth, and the Anglian alliance falls apart. There is infighting among the Bernicians, and the Britons are able to regain much of the lost territory, while Deira takes over some of the south. The prestige of the victory allows Gododdin to become the paramount kingdom among the northern Britons under Mynyddog and his successors. Now, twenty years after Æthelfrith's death, the Britons face two threats - Edwin of Deira, who has ties to the southern kingdom of Mercia, and wily old Áedán mac Gabráin, of the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada, who has lately made common cause with the Pictish tribes of the north.

 

[Psmith]

Better late than never!

Kaiser Wilhelm III's execution in 1952 was the death knell for the German Kaiserreich, which had been only 10 years prior a leading global superpower. The integration of most of Cisleithian Austria after the "intervention" of 1937-38 had brought Germany into a golden age of prosperity and ascendency across all Europe, surpassing France to the West, Pan-Slavia to the East and even the ailing British Empire as it spilled oceans of blood to hold India. It appeared that the future would speak German, and that the world would soon take its orders from Berlin. The unexpected collapse of Mercedes-Benz in 1948, and the Great Chaos that followed, would change all that. All the global powers found themselves paralysed to varying extents by the economic collapse that had so quickly spilled across the world, but Germany was the epicentre of this collapse and for it said paralysis was amplified immensely. Industries simply died, unemployment surged to the 10s of millions, once-thriving centres of commerce became ghost towns. Political unrest soon began to foment, and as moderate politics entered a spiral of decline with the virtual abolition of the Reichstag as a functional entity, uncountable workers (and ex-workers) flocked to the Red Flag in hopes of a better future. The tide of socialism was ruthlessly cracked down upon, but little did the high-ups know that it had already deeply permeated their ranks.
In November 1952, communist-sympathetic elements in the German military staged a coup in Berlin, luring their conservative high command away to a strategy conference in Wallonia and then seizing control of the capital with little opposition. Using the "Council of Proletarian Salvation" as a political front, the leaders of this putsch declared the old Kaiserreich null and void, proclaiming the German Workers' Republic and executing Kaiser Wilhelm III on live television. This absolute termination of the supposedly undying and immortal figurehead of the Reich: the Kaiser on which it was build, was the final nail in the coffin. Virtually overnight, the predominant nation in Europe collapsed utterly, and the new German Red Army marched West.

The right-leaning German High Command, headed by Erich von Manstein, realised that they had to form a rival government as soon as possible. Most significant career politicians had either been in Berlin when the coup took place, or were too remote and divided to form anything coherent on their own. Unfortunately, the communists in the military who had got them into Wallonia had intentionally given them outdated travel papers for the return journey, and so the top army brass of Germany found themselves stuck in a Walloon Hotel Room for the best part of a week while their country entered a downward spiral. When they finally got free in early December, they immediately crossed the border and made for Cologne, which though left-leaning had been kept under control by a reconsolidated loyalist armed forces. Manstein subsequently proclaimed the Cologne Military Government (officially the Government for National Restoration in Germany), assuming the role of interrim-Chancellor.
However, a collection of civilian politicians, led by Konrad Adenauer, had in fact already formed a front for the 'old order' in the preceding week: the Provisional Government of Germany. After much debate, Manstein declared the loyalty of his government and territory to the PGG, realising that a united front against the rapidly expanding GWR was needed, and so assumed a second role of First-Governor for the North-West Administrative Zone. This actually changed very little and the CMG remained a nigh-entirely independent entity under military government, as a reluctant ally of Adenauer's administration in Frankfurt.

In the territory between the Reds and the rump-Reich, simple anarchy had taken hold. Various "provisional Socialist Republics" rose up, only to be supressed by right-wing militias while wannabe nation-builders proclaimed a thousand "new and democratic German Republic"s from every town hall, fire station, post office etc. Meanwhile, all that territory that Germany had won at the end of their Austro-Hungarian intervention slipped away. The Bohemian Parliament was stormed by nationalist elements in their armed forces, with the country declaring independence as the National Republic of Bohemia on Christmas Eve 1952. The day earlier, Archduke Karl declared Austria a free and independent nation once again, although not in time to stop the Italians encroaching on Tirol and Istria, which they had sought since the collapse of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire but never quite managed to scrape until now. France followed this example. In January 1953, the French began a slow and steady push to establish a "safety buffer" between them and the war now engulfing their old enemy. Of course, most Germans saw this as a simple effort to finally settle the question of Alsace-Lorraine once and for all, and with the CMG's assistance the German Provisional Government stopped the French from taking Strassburg. What nobody expected, however, was for the Poles to swoop in a surprise move and seize the bulk of Prussia and Silesia! Officially a "police action", the GWR had lightly defended this territory and with the imminent showdown with their rivals to the West, couldn't afford to risk total war with Warsaw and their allies in Pan-Slavia. And so, the stage was set for one of the bloodiest conflicts in European history: the German Civil War.